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Igor: Hi, my name is Igor.
Wolfgang: And I'm Wolfgang and we are both engineers from Google Waterloo office.
And we're here to answer the question "What does Google do to foster innovation by its
engineers?"
Igor: So that's a really interesting question and I think there are many answers and many
aspects to that question. One of the thing I'd like to mention is that
as a company in general we value taking risks and doing new things that aren't necessarily
proven to be correct or proven to be successful. So managers in general encourage people to
take risks both in their project try to find ways to make it better, tries to make it faster,
tries to make it better for users. And I also to take risks by exploring other
projects that're completely unrelated. So maybe Wolfgang can talk about some of these
ways.
Wolfgang: Yes, so I wanted to talk about 20% of 'em Google.
So 20% of 'em allows engineers at Google to spend one day out of the week to work on whatever
they like. And many times engineers work on some interesting ideas that they have.
They spend this time to develop a prototype that they maybe show other teams or they may
show individual this could turn into a full-scale project.
The other cool thing will do in our office we have innovation week, and that is a week
where every engineer is supposed to work on something completely different for a whole
week. And what We do is we end up discussing ideas
on the first day and then assemble different teams and by the end of the week we try to
have some really cool prototype working and this also has been very successful.